


Heart for the Status Quo

by inalasahl



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 21:49:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1794358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inalasahl/pseuds/inalasahl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natalie is his friend from the first time they meet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart for the Status Quo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galfridian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/gifts).



> This takes place in a mysterious decade when Bruce and Natasha would have been the same age, and Bruce's mother didn't die until he was a teenager. For the prompt, Growing Up Together.

It's overcast the Saturday the Rushmans move in next door and Bruce's mom is trying to talk his dad into walking over with her and offering to help them get everything into the house before the rain starts. "Oh, that dining room table looks _brand new,"_ she says, peeking through the front room curtain. "Brian, really."

"I'm busy," Bruce's dad snaps from his office. His mom calls it an office anyway, but it's a lab. Bruce rubs the sore spot on his arm from where his dad had taken his blood.

"Oh, Bruce, look, they have a daughter," his mom says, absolutely delighted. He looks out of the curtain. She's red-headed and pretty, in an athletic sort of way, and Bruce guesses she'll be the kind of girl to tell lots of stories at school about the weird kid she lives next door to. Not that he cares or anything. Just. He wishes his mom didn't worry so much about him.

"The rain is starting," his mom frets. "Oh, the mattresses. We really should help." The new family already has four guys with them and the mattresses are swathed in plastic like they're brand new anyway, so Bruce doesn't really know why his mom is so worried about it, but Bruce hates letting his mom down, so he pulls on a jacket and heads outside with her.

They don't even have to introduce themselves. Before they've even crossed the yard, Mrs. Rushman is rushing over to introduce herself and her daughter, Natalie. "Do you folks need any help?" Bruce's mom asks.

Mrs. Rushman gives him a dubious glance over. "No, no, we're fine," she says. And okay, Bruce is kind of short, but he's got _some_ muscle. The last thing Bruce wants to do in front of the new girl is try and fail to lift heavy furniture, but he's at least as strong as his _mom,_ so why is he the one getting eyeballed? "I am thankful you came to talk. We are happy to meet neighbors." She sounds kind of stiff and grim, no matter what she says. Mrs. Rushman pushes Natalie over to Bruce. "You go to the high school down the street? My Natalie will be attending and is nervous."

"Oh, Bruce can walk with her and help her get settled."

Bruce shoves his fisted hands in his pocket and waits. He doesn't know how to tell his mom that the last thing Natalie wants is to make her first impression by walking into the school with him. But, oh. Because Natalie isn't rolling her eyes and demurring. She's peering at him in kind of an odd way up through her lashes, but she's smiling. "Hi," she says. Bruce drags a hand through his curls, tries to smile back. It's not love at first sight or anything, he tells himself. He at least waited for her to speak.

* * *

The thing about Bruce, Natasha quickly discovers, is that her training is all _wrong._ It's a new thought, that her instructors could be mistaken, but Bruce is suspicious of flattery, oblivious to flirtation and mildly exasperated rather than charmed by her attempts to keep up with the science club discussion of the projects for the competitions coming up. Somehow between them it works better once she quietly drops science club and joins martial arts instead, and all her instructors need know is that they still walk home together afterward. "I knew you didn't like science," he says, loose-limbed as they walk together, only a little tense, nothing like he'd been before.

She will have to report her failure to convincingly fake interest in the subject, but she doesn't care. Realizes that she wanted someone to have this, even if he didn't know what it was, the gift of a bit of the real her. She knows he knows she's pretty. She's caught him looking at her more than once, but he doesn't try to kiss or charm her. She likes the way he looks at her. He watches her out of the corner of his eye with something like fear and something like awe while he makes his sarcastic, disrespectful comments about their teachers, and she likes it.

She goes with him one weekend to the city science fair and is so pleased when he qualifies for state that it's with genuine pleasure and pride that she rescues his speech notes and display boards as a souvenir, Bruce ducking his head and saying they're just garbage, because now he'll be starting a new project. She tells him that if he doesn't stop arguing, she'll make him spend some of that prize money on taking her out to lunch, and he looks her in the eye so brave and serious when he says, "That wouldn't be a punishment."

It's only later when Sergei Nikolayevich takes the notes to give them to Irina Viktorovna (because surely Brian Banner helped his son a little, at the very least by discussing his work at the dinner table) and tells her she did a good job that she wishes she had made copies, that she realizes she's forgotten Bruce is supposed to be an assignment. She burns with shame, because Bruce isn't even trying to make his way into her heart, and she's supposed to be better than that. But surely he is a special case, because he's not at all what she was led to expect from an American prodigy. He's arrogant, yes, about the science, quick-tempered and careless when he's frustrated, but not, not with people, not with their feelings, even when they deserve it.

On Wednesdays, there is no science club, but he only attends the first of her matches. She waves to where he's sitting in the audience as she waits on the team bench for her turn, so she knows exactly where he is when she gets up to demonstrate her hits and her blocks and catches him flinching and flinching and flinching. By the time she's done he's slumped down in his seat, his face such a baleful blank mask, that she's sick with it, and it shouldn't even bother her at all, because she's known worse, been scornful of those at home who couldn't take the program, and he's upset over nothing, no one is bleeding or dying or disappearing today.

But it does bother her. "Bruce," she whispers, as soon as she can, as soon as she has leave to go to him. "Your _face."_

"It looked like it hurt," he says, ignoring her words to run a gentle finger over a bruise on her forearm.

"It's nothing; it's fine, Bruce," she says.

"I don't like hurt," he says, in the world's smallest voice, and she would kill them, whoever has made him sound like this, and she's glad, instantly, viciously glad, that someday she will be an assassin, and that Bruce is her research assignment. Because she can find out who they are.

"It's nothing," she says again. "But maybe —" She hesitates. It's a big thing to ask him. He's impatient, hates waiting always. It's nothing like asking him to come and _watch_ a match. She looks at his face again and even if it means they don't walk together on these days, she knows she must make the offer. "Maybe next time you could wait for me outside?"

He raises his eyes to hers. "You don't mind," he says, still in that small voice, the one that makes her want to kill for him. He colors. "You don't think that I'm—" He doesn't finish the sentence, but she doesn't think it. She knows she doesn't, whatever it is that he thinks is too bad a word to even say.

She puts a slow, careful arm around him. "Never," she tells him. "Never."

He leans into her arm as he stands, and asks her with a kind of surprise, "Do you know how perfectly you do everything?"

She knows. Her instructors have told her this, have praised her dedication to her training. Knows that Bruce isn't talking about that. "You're easy," she tells him, "to be perfect at."

When he wins the state competition and a seat at the nationals, he's so proud of his medal, so proud of his prize. He claims it's the honor, the words he can put down on his applications that will take him to any of several colleges, but Natasha thinks that's stupid. Of course the medal, the physical evidence, is the prize.

* * *

Bruce's dad is pulling in as they get home, and the win spills out of Bruce before he can think better of it. So Natalie sees when his Dad sneers and slaps a copy of the MIT Technological Review down onto the hood of the car with a picture of a stunned looking teen on the cover. "Howard's son just graduated summa cum laude," he says, "and I'm supposed to care about some high school science project?" though Bruce hears _and I'm supposed to care about you?_ His dad stalks into the house, muttering to himself about adding forms of mental retardation to the list of chromosomal damage to monitor for. 

"Your dad is a penis," Natalie spits.

"A dick," Bruce mumbles.

Natalie pauses. "Like a detective?"

"No, it means—" he blushes suddenly as his brain catches up to thought of saying penis in front of her. "What you said."

Natalie nods. "Yeah, okay. Your dad is a dick."

"Not like your parents," Bruce says, thinking about the night the Rushmans came to dinner and were all politeness, offering careful anecdotes that showed how much they loved Natalie, praising her ability to adjust to a new school, graciously singling out Bruce's help in guiding her, even after he told them that it was all her, that she was funny and smart and so, so serious at everything she did. He kept to himself, though he had thought it, that he could spend a life time next to her, learning how to be good at things. Because he'd never known before that competency could be demonstrated without cruelty, that you could best someone without crushing them. Natalie's parents aren't like his at all and he hates that she's seen.

He blows out a deep breath, sending a couple of curls hanging down onto his forehead off to the side. "I — Mom says he wasn't always like this, so maybe, maybe if I—"

"No," she says, clutching his arm. "You're — good. You're fine, Bruce." She doesn't look at him. "They're only nice, because they're pretending to be normal," she says. "They're not really my parents. We're Russian spies; we're going to steal your dad's work and they're evaluating my ability to infiltrate Americans by making friends with you."

Bruce stares at her in disbelief. That's — that's — the nicest thing anyone besides his mom has ever tried to do, even if it makes him laugh and snort in a way that's not entirely suave. "Sure, and I'm secretly a superhero who could stop a marauding alien ship with one punch!" He hugs her; he can't help it. "Thanks, Natalie," he says.

She gives him a look he can't read and sighs. "It was a really great project, Bruce. You earned that award." He smiles, suddenly feeling a whole lot better. So Natalie's kind of a crazy bad liar, but somehow Bruce doesn't mind. It's the easiest thing in the world to lean over and kiss her. He still doesn't know how to read her expression, but she kisses back, so that has to mean good things.

* * *

Bruce comes to her wrapped in blood not his own, and Natasha does the right thing, the thing that she's supposed to do. She palms his key and slips it to Sergei Nikolayevich, so that he can sneak over to the Banners' house and steal what they can from the lab before the police arrive while Irina Viktorovna makes soothing noises at Bruce and forces tea down his throat.

Bruce's mom is dead, and Natasha can't even tell him how sorry she is without it being part of her cover. It's only the need to hold Bruce's hand that keeps her there on the couch, not running blindly into the into the night to track Brian Banner down (and oh, this is why she is being tested, because she never knew this about herself, that she could want to hurt without regard for her orders, never knew there was a space inside her that could take all that blind emotion and set it aside to complete the assignment).

He knows what she's done when the police arrive, and he goes to give them the key. He thinks he dropped it, lost it, until the chaos in the lab is discovered. The police assume his dad must have done it, continuing his fit of rage, but Bruce stares down at the tea cup in his hands and she knows he knows.

He doesn't say anything, doesn't give her away, even when they take him away in an ambulance as per procedure.

* * *

They don't expect to see each other again.

But the airport has to place an international flight in the domestic concourse and when Bruce goes to get a sandwich from the deli near the gate of the plane that will take him to live with his Aunt Susan, she's standing there, on the other side of a post, nodding her head at whatever her not-parents are saying to her.

She flicks her hands out like she's shooing him away, and he goes. But it's only a few minutes before she comes walking by very fast, toward the restroom, out of sight of her not-parents.

Bruce has so many questions to ask her, but instead he blurts out, "I would be perfect at you if I could."

Natalie whimpers and kisses his cheeks in goodbye. "I would let you see all the things I am good at, show you who I am, so that you could."

They draw apart.

It's twenty years before they see each other again.

* * *

"Bozhe moi," Natasha says as she hangs up, contemplating seeing Bruce, talking to him, for the first time since they were kids. She wants badly to call Clint, but she can't right now, she can't.

* * *

Natasha steps forward into the light, "You know, for a man who's supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked a hell of a place to settle."

"Avoiding stress isn't the secret," he replies, and oh, he's holding himself carefully, so carefully, Natasha thinks, and she has no idea if he recognizes her at all, but she knows she can't leave him here, like this, afraid and alone all over again. She squares her shoulders slightly, but determinedly, don't look like a threat, she thinks to herself, not a threat.

"Then what is it? Yoga?"

"You brought me to the edge of the city, smart. I assume the whole place is surrounded?" He ignores the question she asks, for the one he wants to answer, like always.

"Just you and me."

"And your actress buddy, is she a spy too? Do they start that young?"

"I did."

"Who are you?" he asks, and oh, he does know her, he does. He's asking to see her.

"Natasha Romanoff." Time to show him then.

* * *

Fury promised him the wind, and Natasha will see that it's done, but just now she wants to sit here with Clint's leg tucked in next to her, where she can feel he's safe and eat her shawarma and stare at Bruce, because maybe it will be another twenty years before she sees him again. Bruce angles his chair toward hers, and the two of them are sitting across from each other, but somehow their eyes never meet.

This isn't a mission report. Her training's in interrogation, not sharing information, and she doesn't know where to begin.

"Sorry," he murmurs again, across Clint and seemingly to the air, picking up a conversation from before the battle.

"It's not the first time someone's tried to kill me," she says finally.

"I suppose not. But —"

She holds up a hand to stop him and turns to Clint. "It could have easily been the other way. Remember Uppsala?" she says, drawing his thoughts from wherever troubled place they've gone.

"Yeah, yeah," he says, blinking at Bruce. "You should have seen —"

Her foot finds his under the table and he ducks his head just like 15 all over again. She doesn't know if he'll stay. But she knows she can tell him this, about the red in her ledger, can handle the ink blots in his own. It's a chance. That's all any two people in the world ever have.


End file.
